Date:         Fri, 6 Jun 2014 12:10:45 -0400
Reply-To:     The Bus Depot <vanagon@BUSDEPOT.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         The Bus Depot <vanagon@BUSDEPOT.COM>
Subject:      Re: Honest question for the group
In-Reply-To:  <002b01cf8134$6cbd1fd0$46375f70$@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

> I think all Eurovans are an expensive disaster waiting to happen.  They
are
> essentially orphaned by VW, and they just want them to disappear into the
recycling
> yards.  You'll be able to get expensive VW OEM parts for it (your primary
source for
> engine and transmission parts) only as long as VW chooses to make them.


In my opinion Stuart is overstating this a bit. While a commercial flop in
the U.S., the T4 (Eurovan) was popular in Europe and you still see them
absolutely everywhere. That means that there is enough global demand to keep
parts in production for quite a long time.  The problem is that the large
U.S. auto parts distributors don't bother importing many of them due to the
small market share here, so we have to import them from Europe. We carry a
large selection of OEM parts (Bosch, Sachs, Ate, etc.) for Eurovans for far
less than dealer prices. We can get tens of thousands of additional
Eurovan/T4 parts special-order from Europe on request, as we have close ties
to wholesalers there that do a lot of T4 business. Of course the lead times
can be long for special order items, but if you need something like a fender
or a tail light it will cost a small fraction of the dealer price if you can
wait for it.  One exception is Winnebago-specific parts for the U.S. spec
campers. While we do have a few of those items (i.e. sink faucets, poptop
canvas), many of them are available only from Winnebago dealers.

Ron Salmon
The Bus Depot, Inc.
www.busdepot.com